Things are moving — and it is happening on a global scale. This issue of Palestine Portal brings a startling and hopeful report from England, information about a new resource from a U.S. denomination, and news of an international conference on Christian Zionism sponsored by Kyoto University.
By Palestine Portal | Oct 18, 2021
“It is some kind of miracle…a positive step in breaching the Church of England’s silence and inaction on Palestinian issues.” — Karen Fairfax-Cholmeley of Sabeel-Kairos UK and Global Kairos for Justice
The struggle for the liberation of Palestine has reached a tipping point. A debate is underway In the public square on whether it is accurate to speak of Zionism as settler colonialism. In the U.S. House of Representatives, the words “apartheid” and “State of Israel” were spoken in the same breath in a debate on military funding for Israel.
A parallel tipping point has been reached in the church struggle over Israel and Palestine. Protestant denominations in the U.S. have embraced the call of Palestinian civil society for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions. Churches at denominational levels in Norway, South Africa and the United States have renounced Zionism, declaring, in the words of the 2020 “Cry for Hope” of Global Kairos for Justice that “support for the oppression of the Palestinian people, whether passive or active, through silence, word or deed, is a sin, incompatible with the Christian faith and a grave misuse of the Bible.”
Leah Nussbaum and Evan Traylor, students at Hebrew Union College in New York. (credit: Damon Casarez for The New York Times)
How a new generation of Jewish leaders began to rethink their support for Israel.
By Marc Tracy | The New York Times Magazine | Nov 2, 2021
“For those of us for whom Israel has represented hope and justice, we need to give ourselves permission to watch, to acknowledge what we see, to mourn and to cry. And then, to change our behavior and demand better.” — an open letter to American Jews
It began, as so much these days does, with a group chat. Early this year, around 20 rabbinical and cantorial students started a WhatsApp thread they eventually named “Rad Future Clergy.” Among them, they attended rabbinical schools in five different U.S. cities. Several of them first became friends while studying and working in a sixth city, Jerusalem, the capital of the land that both the Torah and Israel’s declaration of independence deem the place for “the ingathering of the exiles.”
In April, the texting heated up. A longstanding effort by a right-wing Jewish group to assume ownership of Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah, an East Jerusalem neighborhood, was coming to a head. Israel’s government characterized the issue as a mere “real estate dispute,” which was true in a narrow sense but elided the winding history of the homes’ ownership — which changed hands as the land beneath them did over the course of two wars — as well as the Jewish group’s frank goal of altering East Jerusalem’s demographics to secure it permanently for Israel. Protests in the neighborhood spread to the nearby Temple Mount, a holy site for both Jews and Muslims, where riot police fired rubber bullets and Arab protesters threw stones following Friday prayers.
An altar boy stands with a candle in front of an image of the late South African leaker President Nelson Mandela on display during a special Sunday service in his honor at the Holy Family Church in the West Bank city of Ramallah on Dec 8 2013. (credit: Issam Rimawi / APA Images)
The Episcopal Church of Vermont stood up loudly against Israel’s U.S.-backed oppression of the Palestinians, Nov. 4, as its annual convention, condemning by an 89-25 majority what it said are the Jewish State’s apartheid policies.
By Steve France | Mondoweiss | Nov 5, 2021
The openness of the other delegates seemed also to show that general awareness of public protests against Israel is rapidly growing…
The Episcopal Church of Vermont stood up loudly against Israel’s U.S.-backed oppression of the Palestinians, Nov. 4, as its annual convention, condemning by an 89-25 majority what it said are the Jewish State’s apartheid policies.
The action added to a barrage of condemnations of Israel’s apartheid regime since January by human rights groups and leaders and is of special significance to other Episcopal dioceses – and beyond that to other mainline church denominations — that are under rising pressure from members pressing for similar condemnations. The first major denomination to conclude that it was compelled to call out Israel and its U.S. sponsors on apartheid and a host of related injustices – the United Church of Christ — acted only last July but its resolution was seen then as a harbinger of actions to come from sister denominations.
Israeli security forces intervene Palestinian demonstrators as Palestinians gather to demonstrate against the new construction of Jewish settlements and separation wall in Turmus Ayya village of Ramallah, West Bank on August 07, 2020. (credit: Issam Rimawi / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
A growing consensus has formed around the term—not as a rhetorical comparison to South Africa, but describing a system of domination built on the partition of Palestine.
By Tareq Baconi | The New York Review | Nov 5, 2021
“What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control.” — Report from B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization
Future historians may single out 2021 as the year the tide turned for the Palestinian struggle—though it was hard to see coming. The final months of 2020 were among the bleakest in decades, as a US administration bent on furthering Israel’s right-wing expansionist vision sought to dismantle, bit by bit, the central concerns that make up the Palestinian cause: the right of refugees to return to homes from which they were expelled in 1948, the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right to self-determination on lands currently occupied by Israel. At the year’s end, the coup de grâce came when several Arab states turned their backs on Palestine, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel despite its continuing subjugation of Palestinians. The Palestinian people seemed to have been vanquished, while Israel pursued its annexation of occupied territory.
But breakthroughs came unexpectedly. In January 2021, B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. In it, the authors argued that their organization’s mandate from its founding in 1989—to bring to light Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Territories—was no longer adequate. “The situation has changed,” the report explained. “What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel’s control.”
The power of this report was not in the accusation, delivered by an Israeli organization, that Israel was practicing apartheid; Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization committed to protecting Palestinians living under Israel’s military regime in the West Bank, had leveled that charge six months earlier, as had several leading Israeli public figures. Indeed, numerous Israeli and international voices have warned for years that Israeli practices, left unchecked, would amount to a system of apartheid. What was different about B’Tselem’s analysis was its challenge to a pervasive myth, one to which much of the international community subscribes, that Israel’s military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory can be treated as somehow separate from the state of Israel. Instead, the organization characterized Israel as a single “regime that governs the entire area.”
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An office of the NSO Group in Sapir, Israel. The company makes surveillance software which can be remotely implanted in smartphones. (credit: Sebastian Scheiner / Associated Press)
The ban is the strongest step an American president has taken to curb abuses in the global market for spyware.
By David E. Sanger, Nicole Perlroth, Ana Swanson and Ronen Bergman| The New York Times | Nov 3, 2021
…the Biden administration warned that the surveillance software was being abused by authoritarian nations.
In a remarkable breach with Israel over one of its most successful technology companies, the Biden administration on Wednesday blacklisted the NSO Group, saying the company knowingly supplied spyware that has been used by foreign governments to “maliciously target” the phones of dissidents, human rights activists, journalists and others.
The firm, and another Israeli company, Candiru, acted “contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States,” the Commerce Department said, a striking accusation against a business that operates under the direct supervision of the Israeli government.
More than two dozen US states have adopted anti-boycott legislation (credit: AFP / File photo)
A Palestinian-owned company is refusing to sign a contract requiring it to pledge to not boycott Israel.
By Middle East Eye | Nov 2, 2021
“It is my right and duty to boycott Israel and any products of Israel…this policy is against my constitutional right and against International Law.” — Rasmy Hassouna, the company’s executive vice president
A Palestinian-owned engineering firm has filed a lawsuit challenging a Texas law that bars the state from doing business with companies participating in the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.
A&R Engineering and Testing Inc said in a complaint filed in a Houston federal court that the law violates its First Amendment right to participate in economic boycotts as a form of protest.
“It is my right and duty to boycott Israel and any products of Israel,” said Rasmy Hassouna, the company’s executive vice president, according to the complaint. “This policy is against my constitutional right and against International Law.”
A hand, painted with the Palestinian flag, is raised during a demonstration in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, 30 July 2021 (credit: AFP)
The aim is to embarrass Europe into defunding Palestinian human rights groups who have been effective at documenting Israeli war crimes, and therefore prevent further scrutiny.
By Jonathan Cook | Middle East Eye | Oct 25, 2021
“Gantz says we are a terror organization, when he himself is a war criminal”. — Shawan Jabareen, director of al-Haq
Did someone forget to tell Benny Gantz that Donald Trump is no longer the United States president?
It certainly looked that way last Friday as Israel’s defense minister – who has been presented as a force for moderation in an Israeli government led by the settler right – declared six leading Palestinian human rights groups to be “terrorist organizations”.
The move effectively outlaws the most prominent organizations in the Palestinian human rights community.
A boy with his teddy bear sits on the ruins of buildings destroyed by Israeli airstrikes in the Sheikh Ridvan neighborhood in Gaza City on May 19, 2021. (credit: Ali Jadallah / Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)
Nearly 300 U.S.-based civil society groups told Secretary of State Antony Blinken threats against the Palestinian human rights movement is a threat against movements for social justice everywhere.
By Kenny Stancil | Common Dreams | Oct 29, 2021
“Smearing the promotion and defense of human rights as ‘terrorist’ activity is a dangerous, well-worn tactic of authoritarian regimes.”
A broad coalition of nearly 300 U.S.-based social justice groups on Friday urged the Biden administration to “immediately and unequivocally” condemn the Israeli government’s recent decision to classify a half-dozen Palestinian human rights groups as “terrorist organizations.”
“These actions by the Israeli government are a clear attack on human rights,” says the coalition in its letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “As such, we urge you to issue a swift rejection of this unprecedented attack on Palestinian human rights organizations and the attempt by the Israeli government to shut down, delegitimize, isolate, and chill a growing human rights movement.”
“These actions by the Israeli government are a clear attack on human rights,” says the coalition in its letter to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken. “As such, we urge you to issue a swift rejection of this unprecedented attack on Palestinian human rights organizations and the attempt by the Israeli government to shut down, delegitimize, isolate, and chill a growing human rights movement.”
TALMON, WEST BANK – MARCH 23, 1989: A Jewish settler armed with an Uzi machine gun watches as settlers move caravans and equipment March 23, 1989 to establish the new settlement of Talmon north-west of the nearby Palestinian town of Ramallah in the West Bank. As of December 2003, the left-wing Israeli Peace Now movement said that Talmon had over 1,600 residents. (Photo by Maggie Ayalon / GPO via Getty Images)
In a widely condemned move, the Israeli government has banned the group I founded. This is how it enforces impunity for its illegal policies of occupation.
By Raja Shehadeh | The New York Review | Oct 27, 2021
Throughout the more than four decades since Al-Haq’s founding, the organization has continued to serve the objectives for which it was established: documenting and resisting through the law Israeli human rights violations, including the mistreatment of prisoners, the economic exploitation of the Occupied Territories’ natural resources, and the illegal settlement building.
In 1978 I returned to Ramallah from my legal studies in London brimming with ideas about the importance of the rule of law and the possibilities for resisting the Israeli occupation using international law. The following year, I and two colleagues, a Yale graduate named Charles Shammas and the American lawyer Jonathan Kuttab, established an organization we called Al-Haq (Arabic for The Right) as an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) in Geneva. It was one of the first human rights groups in the Arab world and the first and only one of its kind in the Israeli-occupied territories.
Al-Haq’s first major activity was to document the extensive changes in local laws in the occupied West Bank mandated by Israeli military orders. These, in violation of international law, were designed to enable Israel to carry out illegal acquisitions of land for the building of illegal Israeli settlements. In a study Jonathan and I authored, titled The West Bank and the Rule of Law, published in 1980 jointly by Al-Haq and the ICJ, we pointed out that these orders were withheld from public view. That Israel was thus using secret legislation to break international law was a national embarrassment, though it was denied by the government and initially challenged by a number of Israeli journalists. After investigating the matter, these journalists learned that we had not exaggerated and that these orders indeed had not been published.
Petition to stand in solidarity with the six Palestinian human rights and civil society organizations designated by the Israeli Defense Ministry as “terrorist organizations.”
By Defense for Children International – Palestine | Oct 29, 2021
We call upon the international community to strongly and swiftly condemn the Israeli government’s actions and urge Israeli authorities to reverse this decision immediately and cease attempts to criminalize lawful human rights and civil society work. — DCI Palestine Petition
On October 19, the Israeli Ministry of Defense declared six prominent Palestinian civil society and human rights organizations to be “terrorist organizations.” The six organizations are Al-Haq, Addameer, Bisan Center for Research and Development, Defense for Children International – Palestine, the Union of Agricultural Work Committees, and the Union of Palestinian Women Committees.
These organizations advocate for Palestinian human rights at the local and international levels, provide services and support to women, children, farmers, and prisoners, and collectively support thousands of Palestinians across the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.
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